


A Cleansing Steam

by aurilly



Category: David Blaize - E. F. Benson
Genre: Friends With Benefits, Lovers to Friends, M/M, Moving On, Reunions, Unrequited Frank/David, sauna sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 03:59:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13138617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: Frank's heart is finally, officially broken when David gets married. However, closing a door sometimes reopens other, better ones.





	A Cleansing Steam

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MildredMost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MildredMost/gifts).



> I started writing this LAST Yuletide, but couldn't finish in time, and then for Fandom5K pinch hit treats and couldn't finish in time. I really wanted to finish for this Yuletide. I hope you still like this pairing!

“Goodbye! Thank you!” 

David graced the gathering with one last smile and a final wave, his gaze lastly settling on Frank for a personal farewell. Then, with the boyish energy he retained even now at twenty-four, he swung himself into the carriage and pulled the door closed behind him.

Now that it had swallowed its handsome occupants and was being pulled into jolting motion by the coachman’s horses, the carriage seemed even more smugly malicious to Frank’s eyes than previously, when it had merely stood in the driveway as an empty ornament. The darkly fanciful part of him, always present but rarely employed in such guilty fantasies, imagined—wished for—the carriage to become a pumpkin, safely disgorging David first, of course, before rejecting the wheels and forever consuming the bride inside. 

Frank shook his head. No, he told himself, Elizabeth was lovely, kind, everything one should wish to see his friend find and marry. Furthermore, if anything should befall her, David’s grief would be great indeed. It was evil, shameful, to wish her, and David, by extension, ill. As always, Frank decided to swallow these thoughts into himself and rely upon his Dorian Grey-like exterior to hide the festering ugliness.

Frank was still staring, imagination in full black flower, at the slowly shrinking carriage, when he felt a pressure on his elbow.

“They make a very handsome couple, don’t they?” David’s father said. 

“The handsomest I’ve ever seen,” Frank said. He hadn’t spoken a single lie today, but neither had he spoken as much as he normally did.

“I know when the time comes, David will gladly perform the same service for you.”

“I’ve no doubt of it. But that day is not yet on the horizon, even though I am three years older than him.”

“You’re still quite young. Give it time.”

To no one’s surprise, David had chosen Frank to be his best man. And in this capacity, Frank had performed all the requisite tasks with unimpeachable dedication. However, it was Bags, in his ever-increasing lordly munificence, who had provided all the little touches that made the day special for David, with the kind of genuine joy that Frank had barely been able to feign. 

It was Bags who had procured the finest scotch for David to share in the garden with his closest friends the night before. It was Bags whose Sloane Street barber had provided the French pomade that had tamed, for the first time in David’s life, the ludicrous blond curls at the back of his head. And it was Bags who had arranged for the open-topped black cars that now arrived to escort the bridal party to his estate in Billingshurt for continued revelries. Transporting them all required an entire fleet of cars, as David was blessed with many friends, and, while Frank had been singled out above all the rest, his large, warm heart hadn’t been able to leave any out of the inner circle. 

“You’ll ride with me, won’t you, Frank?” Marjory asked, looking hopefully up at him. The shape of her face, the profusion of honey-gold hair, the doe-like fan of her eyelashes, and the ready smile had always made for a startling resemblance to her brother. They had not been quite so alike in their youth, but as the years passed, they’d grown more similar, a sort of Viola and Sebastian.

Marjory had married years before, but her husband had died in the war only a few months later, leaving her just as she’d been before, only this time in possession of a much larger fortune. She had always had rather a weakness for Frank, a weakness her brother had never shared, heaven mocking Frank. 

Frank looked down at her small hand at his elbow and saw an entire path unspool before him. It would be so easy to escort her into one of the waiting cars, to sit close and hold her hand through the bumps along the road. He could add a few pretty compliments to the easy conversation they'd always shared. She would be immensely gratified, the Dean would approve, and David… David had always expressed a boyish wish to have Frank as a brother, not only in the metaphorical brotherhood of friendship, but in actual fact. 

It would have been so easy for him to amuse her during dinner, to walk with her through Bags's nouveau chateau, leveraging rom after white-sheeted room and the portrait gallery of ugly Crabrees past to create gothic tales of for her amusement. How she would shiver in dreadful delight and draw closer to Frank's side. It would be so easy to lean in and take from her, to ensure he touched her as little as possible so as not to register the softness where what he wanted was hardness, to squint just enough to imagine that the face before him was...

A chill, infinitely more severe, and decidedly less delicious, overtook Frank, so violently that her hand was shaken entirely off his elbow.

"Are you all right, Frank?" she asked when too long had elapsed without a reply to her first question. 

He was not all right, not at all. Never, except once, on an afternoon during David's first term, had Frank experienced such extreme self-revulsion. How could he, for a moment think of deceiving dear Marjory, of deceiving himself, like that? What kind of man--except the blackest, falsest, most despicable kind--would even entertain such thoughts, bidden or not, about his friend's sister? After all these years, he remained a monster, he now saw, but a different sort of monster, aggravated and twisted by bitterness. 

Unlike his last moment of clarity, on that day in the baths, Frank could not immediately see which path he wanted to take. However, he could see that the path he had trod for ten years had to be abandoned. 

"I am… sorry," he finally choked out, voice strangled and after too long of a pause. "But I don’t think I can ride with you.”

Frank barely heard her murmurings of worry. Bags's call, supplemented in volume by a chorus from AJ, Tommers and Jevons, barely registered. He knew he was committing the worst kind of rudeness when he walked over to one of the waiting cars and flung himself in. They were meant to be full before they departed, but Frank told the driver that he had to go to the station immediately, and alone.

The village in which Elizabeth had grown up was only half an hour from London. Stumbling off the train into the crowded, vaporous station provided the relief of anonymity. He stood for a time at the end of the platform, musing on where to go next. His mother was entertaining guests from Paris this week, and he was in no frame of mind to force conversation with them. With nowhere else to go, he made his way to his club. 

"A pleasure to see you, Mr Maddox," Hopper, the doorman said, and Frank marveled at the man’s memory, since it had been some time since he’d visited. 

“Is the pool available today?” he asked. 

“It is, sir. You’ll find it, and the entire club, rather empty. Most of the members have already left London for Goodwood weekend.”

“Excellent.” It was exactly as Frank had hoped and expected.

Frank would not have chosen the Drones of his own accord, but David had dearly wanted to join, finding the boorishness jolly, and the bread-slinging a sign of continued boyish high spirits. Frank had never been without David, but today was a day of firsts, he’d decided on the train.

As promised, he found the rooms nearly as silent as those of the Senior Conservative, his preferred club. London's smart set had decamped almost entirely for the pleasures of Goodwood.

He went to the changing room and stripped down before passing into the pool. Long and wide and festooned and lit by a lovely stained glass ceiling, the pool was the Drones’s best feature. Many infamous parties had been hosted here, but today Frank was the only swimmer, and had his pick of lanes. He swam until his muscles gave out, for what must have been hours, giving himself a new sort of flagellating baptism. He swam until he could feel himself sinking, legs too weak to kick himself afloat. 

When he emerged, dripping and wobbly, he felt changed somehow. Cleaner. Fresh. Like a butterfly, he felt too tired by his transformation to move. He pulled himself the few feet to the steam room, which was, like the pool, empty. The attendant must have slacked in his duties given how few patrons had come today, for Frank had not seen him all throughout his swim, and the coals had gone cold. Rather than have to interact with anyone, Frank replenished stoked and replenished them himself. Soon, he was sweating away the last of his wickedness. He lay his towel on the warm wood of the bench, rested his elbows on his knees, and hid his face in his trembling hands. 

He truly did feel blank, thrust back in time to that awful day when he'd decided to change himself. He had gone down one path that day, he saw--taking David as his salvation and keeping him near in order to save himself by protecting David. That path had not quite worked.

Today, he'd start down a different path, he decided. The friendship that he had held so central and so dear had, in many ways, turned to poison. Now that he had seen it, Frank refused to continue polluting the good that had come from it--polluting David himself-- with desires he had never truly vanquished. 

It was a new day, a new world. A David-free world. The enormity of it, and of its possibility, terrified him. 

He was still drowning in his thoughts and resolutions when he heard the door to the steam room open for another member enter. 

After some minutes, he heard the other man shuffling and fidgeting, sliding his feet most annoyingly along the wet tile. Some rhetorical-sounding murmurs finally crescendoed in the exhortation of, “Dash it. I simply must ask. Awfully sorry if I’ve got the wrong chap, but…”

Frank looked up and around at this, removing his hands from his face for the first time. The man had taken a seat on the row of benches above him, which meant that Frank’s first view was of a pair of large, well-balanced feet grounding long, muscular calves lightly striped with auburn wet hair. Frank was still in the process of moving his gaze up to the knobby knees and the dark cavern under the towel that covered his lap when the man exclaimed, “I was right! It is you!”

Frank blinked and took in the entirety of the man. He’d filled out considerably, especially across his broad chest and muscular shoulders. Even sitting down, he looked a good six inches taller than he remembered. The baby fat had melted away to highlight sharp cheekbones and an aquiline nose—a nose that Maddox remembered, with a surge of long-repressed admiration and affection, having once written a quatrain about. 

“Hughes?” 

“Hullo, Maddox.”

Hughes slid down to side beside Frank. In the shuffle, Hughes’s left foot rested for a moment atop Frank’s right, which made Frank gulp, but Hughes thankfully shifted his bottom a little further away, the better to angle himself for conversation. 

“How did you know it was me?” Frank asked.

“Your hair still parts in the same crooked way when wet. And the birthmark just below your hip here.” Hughes pointed at it, finger coming a little too temptingly close to Frank’s backside. Then he leaned back, appraising. “You haven’t changed a bit. Not in, Lord, has it been ten years?”

“Pretty nearly. You’ve grown up though. You’re practically a mountain now.” The long string of grievances for which Frank was responsible unraveled themselves in his mind, as if on a damning scroll, read by ancient judges with shaking heads.

“I was only fifteen, still a growing boy. I say, Maddox,” Hughes continued, veneer of dispassion cracking a bit with what sounded like genuine worry, as though neither time nor betrayal had passed since their last meeting. “Are you all right? You’ve been brooding something terrible since before I came in.”

“I’m all right,” Frank asked, and as he heard himself speak, he realized that it was not a lie. Trying to change the subject, he said, “I didn’t know you belonged to this club.”

“I was about to say the same thing to you. I’ve got a country membership, since I’m rarely in town, or even in England really.”

“Why aren’t you at Goodwood with everyone else?”

“I had planned to go, but my pater fell rather ill last week. He asked me to stay behind to keep him company.” Hughes shrugged his muscular shoulders.

“Is he all right?” Frank asked, reminded that Hughes, for all his—now not quite remembered faults—had always been an extremely dutiful son, quite attentive and fond of his parents and sisters. It was a wholesome quality that had quite endeared him during those early days, when Frank was getting to know his first fag and trying to figure out what to make of having one. 

“He’s on the mend. Well enough that his business partner came by for a few hours to catch him up on the latest. I thought, since I wouldn’t be needed, I could avail myself of the empty pool. I had thought I’d be the only man at the club today. Instead I find you, which is even better luck.”

“You said you haven’t been in the country much?” 

“I’ve just come off a year in Malta, and they’re shipping me to the Rhine next week.”

“You’re in the army?” Frank asked, and felt a pang of guilt for having no idea what the boy he’d corrupted had become.

“Yes, I went to Sandhurst, didn’t you know?”

“Now that you mention it, David did mention some—”

Hughes laughed, the same open-hearted laugh that had so captivated Frank long ago. “David Blaize, do you mean? By jove, it’s been years since I thought about him. Do you still talk to old Blazides?”

“I was best man at his wedding this morning,” Frank said solemnly.

“How ripping. I’m sure he was…” But then Hughes seemed to catch that which Frank so desperately wanted to keep hidden, and stopped, and shook his head. “Oh, Maddox. You haven’t… You _have_ , haven’t you? And worse, you never even did. And now he’s married. Oh, the irony of it all. I never expected to see the end of this particular set-piece, but here I am. And to think, I came here only with a mind to have a quiet swim and a steam this evening.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Frank said, and stared down at a crack in one of the floor tiles. 

“No wonder you looked so miserable when you came in. You always took things entirely too seriously, whether it was cribbing or games or what should have simply been a bit of fun in the baths after cricket practice. It was part of your allure, I suppose. I could see it even as a first-year, but I didn’t understand it until later, after you’d chucked me, and yourself. Damn shame it was.”

“What do you mean? ‘Chucked myself’?” Frank said, sitting up straight to combat this confusing insult. It was the first time all day that anything had distracted Frank from his shambolic melancholy.

“I mean when you turned yourself into some sort of guardian angel, the patron saint of David Blaize’s innocence. No one could tell—at first, if it was all an act, because it was plain to anyone, even to Adams, that your palms began to sweat every time he set foot in a room. The chaps were taking bets about it. But I knew you well enough to see that it was real, in your own way. You’d simply gone too far in the other direction, is all, like a silly pendulum. Strange choice for it, too. He was a wonderful chap, a great friend of mine in previous days, but there was nothing so _very_ special about him. Only you and Bags ever seemed to see anything more in him than the rest of us. He was probably still keeping stag beetles as pets, the little scug, when you lost your mind about him. I never understood. There were plenty of better-looking boys at Marchester, too. Perhaps not in Adams’s, but in the other houses.”

Frank could not believe his ears. He’d suffered over the years, tormented himself with visions of Hughes—perfectly preserved in Frank’s memory as a skinny, good-looking lad of sixteen. Through scenes of squalor and obvious misery, Hughes’s spectre had chastised Frank’s corrupting wickedness, and cursed his Pied Piper-like leadership down a path of expulsion and disgrace.

But now, in reality, Hughes seemed quite confident and content. He demonstrated none of the festering ill will Frank had expected. He seemed, in fact, to be chastising Frank for not being wicked _enough_.

 _It is worse_ , Frank thought to himself. _I corrupted him so fully that he cannot even see his shame, nor mine. I am the worst of the damned._

Hughes must have read his expression, because he sighed. “Oh, no you don’t. I won’t stand for it, do you hear?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can see it in your face. You’re trying to convince yourself that I must be very bad, and that it’s all your evil doing, but I won’t have it. I won’t have you pitying me like some wronged orphan out of Dickens. I won’t have you praying for my immortal soul or pretending the man I have become is all your doing. Especially not when I haven’t seen you in ten years. Of all the self-important cheek. I am my own doing, do you hear?”

“But it _was_ me. If I hadn’t… If things between us had stayed as they were meant to be, if I had looked out for you as any senior boy ought to look out for his fag, you would not have...”

“I would have chased after Thompson and written him that letter all the same. Gotten expelled all the same. That’s the problem with all you Old Boys. You think school is everything, because your lives are too little to know anything else. I studied at home for a couple of years and then passed into Sandhurst like nothing ever happened. I’m a captain now. I’ve had a ripping time of it. If you played any part in it, I should thank you.”

Frank’s jaw usually so resolute, had gone incrementally wobbly during this speech, as his outlook and understanding of the world had turned upside down. To have Hughes go so far as to _thank_ him… this went beyond misguidedness, and hinted at something else entirely. For Hughes did seem rather happy, in the way of a good man, not the false, disjointed gaiety of the dissolute. He glowed, perhaps not with the same brightness as David—but, then, who did?—but easily as brightly as Bags and Tommers and all the rest of the good fellows who counted among Frank’s friends.

He’d crafted and perfected his apology over the years in his mind, but now that he was delivering it to an uncaring audience`, it fell flat. “I… I’m sorry, Tom. I never did say. I was a terrible chap back then.”

“Oh, stow it. You were a perfectly splendid chap. It was only when you decided to try your hand at sainthood that you became tiresome and crabby. I’d never seen you in a bad temper before, but after you switched my rooms… Oh, you were miserable. Probably still are, if you’ve been hanging around old Blaize all these years, only to watch him get married. Don’t you think it’s time you came off it?”

At some point during the conversation, Hughes had slid a little closer, so close that Frank could feel the sweat dripping down his arm mingle with the sweat dripping down Hughes’s. The closeness, both to Hughes himself, and to the memory of his boyish, unfettered self, spurred him to speak more honestly than he had in about ten years.

“I was… I was actually considering it when you came in. Coming off it, I mean. A change. I don’t know yet to what. I hadn’t gotten that far.”

“Why don’t you travel a bit? It’s done me wonders. Is there anywhere you could go?”

Frank stretched himself a little, relaxing into the comfort of Hughes’s judgment-free good cheer, so much better than he deserved. “They’re opening a new museum in Paris. Similar to the British Museum, you know? I could… An uncle of mine has some sort of involvement. I… I could apply for one of the antiquity positions.” Frank looked at Hughes’s confused face and realized that Hughes knew nothing about him—a thrilling sort of fresh start—and would not understand the significance of it. He explained, “I did a fellowship and things at Cambridge, Greek studies.”

Hughes laughed. “I’m not in the least bit surprised. You always helped me with my construes, do you remember? Patient as anything, you were. That was the part of Marchester I was most glad to leave behind. No one in the army cares a fig about how good your Latin declensions are.”

“That’s good, for yours were uniformly awful.”

They laughed together, reminisced about some of the fun they’d had, and laughed some more. Frank would never have thought seeing Hughes again could be so easy. He hadn’t thought seeing _anyone_ for whom he’d entertained such feelings could be so easy. He felt light for the first time in years. During their conversation, with sweat now pouring freely down their increasingly close foreheads, Frank really did ‘come off it’, once and for all. Being with David had been good, wonderful, but not being with him, as Frank had decided today to try, promised different pleasures.

“Do you know,” Hughes said, after a long laugh and a subsequent companionably quiet spell, “I’m completely incapable of watching cricket games? Haven’t been able to sit through one for years.”

“Why?”

“I get all… unseemly.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you remember the time you caught me trespassing on the O’Neils’ lands, east of the school?”

Frank laughed at the memory, of Hughes’s stained trousers and guilt-stained face. “Always playing the goat. I had to give you ten whacks.” As the memory flowed through him, from his head down into his arms and his fingers, the sensory perception of holding the cricket bat, inflicting the whack, he understood what Hughes meant, and gulped. He looked down and saw that Hughes was well on his way to an unseemly state right now. “Oh.”

“Yes. You always had a way with that bat, both on and off the field. Such a furrow of concentration, right…” He ran his finger down the center of Frank’s sweaty forehead, coming so close that their noses almost brushed. “There it is. I only ever saw it during games, or when you were whacking someone, or, well, in moments like this.”

“Hughes…” Frank began, trying to scold, but finding himself ill-equipped. It had been so long since he’d let himself so close to temptation. He sat poised, between the Frank of yesterday and the Frank of the future. 

“No one cares outside of school, you know. Well, perhaps they do at the ‘varsity. I wouldn’t know about that, but in the army, as long as you keep it discreet—as discreet as you would anything with a girl—no one cares. It was quite the revelation. I used to think about you, you know, after I realized that. The way you always looked during my last term at Marchester, as though you’d come from giving yourself seven lashes. All that unhappiness, simply for giving me the same hand you gave yourself. We hadn’t even done anything.”

“What more do you…” Frank could not continue, not when he felt Hughes’s hand slide across his leg, coming tantalizing close to resting atop the too-small towel that was already proving insufficient to hide Frank’s reawakened interest.

Hughes’s eyes went wide. “You don’t mean to say you haven’t… Maddox, when was the last…?” The answer must have been clear. “Oh, no. You absurd, utterly absurd fellow.”

Frank shuddered completely when he felt Hughes’s hand now reach under the towel to grasp him fully. He bucked involuntarily into the touch, the first he’d felt from another hand in ten years, since _this_ hand. Hughes had grown in so many ways, but his touch had not changed, nor had the eagerness of his rubbing thumb.

“You shouldn’t… We can’t… Oh, Topknot,” he moaned, the old sobriquet emerging from a locked-away part of his mind as Hughes picked up the pace, using the sweat from between Frank’s thighs to slick the way.

“You’ve been missing out if you think that’s all there is. Lord, who would ever have thought it would be me teaching _you_ anything…”

Hughes took the opportunity of Frank’s confusion to change their position, to climb directly into Frank’s lap, bracketing Frank’s thighs with his own and losing his towel in the process. He was hot and wet and glisteningly naked as he pressed Frank back against the tile. Instead of suffocated by Hughes’s presence, Frank felt almost liberated. It was a new day, he tried to remind himself, as a war waged within him for the control of his movements. On the one hand, this was wrong; it was everything he had spent ten tears trying to stamp out. But on the other, that stamping had been its own kind of evil, the worst hypocrisy. Surely, Hughes’s presence here must be a sign. Frank’s superstitious sign felt certain of it.

“Do you remember that day after the match against Harrow?” Hughes asked, but the question underlying the words was actually an entirely different one, one of permission, an unspoken repetition of what Frank had asked for that day. “Behind—”

“—behind the equipment room?” Frank whispered, giving his assent with a kiss, as Hughes had so long ago. 

He watched more than willed it as his hand crept up Hughes’s thigh toward the cock that had lengthened and filled out over the years. Hughes made just the same face, panted in just the same way. And Frank, it turned out, had not lost the knack of this. 

They kissed and rutted against one another until their lips had chapped, even in the moist room. Frank couldn’t tell how much sweat had been there before and how much they generated. For all that Frank had not been touched in ten years, it was Hughes who finished first, gasping, “Frank, Frank, how I m—” into Frank’s black curls. His hand on Frank’s cock stilled, long enough for Frank to begin having a crisis of character. In the meanwhile, he hugged Hughes closely until his breathing evened out.

“Mmm,” Hughes said, raising himself up. He took one look at Frank’s face and said, in the voice he must have used as a captain. “It’s all right. I promise.”

“It’s not in any way all right. Someone could come in. Someone could have. You would have lost your rank. I would have…”

Hughes silently climbed off, leaving Frank feeling cold in a hundred degree room. He did something clever with his discarded towel and the door structure, effectively locking them in. 

“There you go, not that there’s anyone else in the club.” Hughes returned to stand in front of Frank, but instead of resuming his previous position, he sank to his knees between Frank’s legs, and smiled at Franks’ cock, which arched towards him, harder than it had ever been.

As soon as Hughes began to draw his lips toward it, Frank’s brain whirred back into functionality, like a sewing machine that had momentarily lost its pedaling foot. Frank had never done this before, nor had it done to him, but he knew what Hughes was about. 

“Hughes, you can’t. We shouldn’t.” However, the words sounded like an echo of a lie, like a different man had said it.

Hughes shook his head. “It’s hardly any different from what you just did for me. What they tell you about in chapel—life, God, and all that—it isn’t like Adams’s house, Frank. It isn’t a Latin exam. There’s no partial credit. If you’re going to sin, Frank, then sin.”

Without waiting for further deliberation, Hughes leaned forward and began licking at Frank’s hardness. He’d barely taken it into his mouth fully before Frank came with a shout, clutching Hughes’s bottom with his feet and hitting his head with a painful crack against the tile. 

Hughes sat back on his heels with a pleased smile.

“Shall we have another swim? I’ll wager I can finally beat you at a race,” he said, as though nothing had happened.

“Ripping,” Frank replied, because perhaps nothing much had.

As if in a daze, the two of them unlatched the towel contraption and returned to the main pool room, which was still empty. They raced (and Hughes, with his newfound height, did win every time), they splashed, they laughed like the schoolboys they had once been. This was Frank’s second baptism of the day, and this time, he came out, not blank, but having remembered himself. 

When they’d finished and changed, they parted ways at the door of the club. 

“I’m glad my father’s business partner stopped by the house today,” Hughes said, and offered his hand for a shake.

“I’m glad, too,” Frank said, and meant it. “Thank you.”

“Perhaps I’ll look you up when next I pass through Paris? It most likely won’t be for a year or two.”

“Perhaps. But you can write to my mother’s, in case I end up elsewhere,” Frank said. “If not Paris, somewhere else.

“I’m glad I came to the club today.”

“So am I.”

Without looking back, Frank turned homewards. He walked with his hands in his pockets, a smile on his lips, and, even though it was evening, he thought he could see the dawn.


End file.
